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JustMe

Patron Meritorious

Helluva Hoax made me laugh out loud.
There are penalties for that.
There is an IAS war chest for that.
PIs may need to be hired to track down Helluva Hoax.
PIs and Lawyers may need to be hired to get Helluva Hoax to shut up.
PIs may need to intimidate HH if he refuses to take a bribe and sign a non disclosure gag order....


Actually Helluva Hoax is my friend and she and I from time to time video skype.

For $150,000 (a third to me, a third to her and a third to the biggest Anon party EVAR) I will tell you how to find her.

If you do it by this Thursday at 2pm, I will even tell you with what "Big Bang Theory" character she identifies, (Hint it's not "Penny" as I already claimed Penny).

What do you think HH, shall we do it?
 

JustMe

Patron Meritorious
Actually Helluva Hoax is my friend and she and I from time to time video skype.

For $150,000 (a third to me, a third to her and a third to the biggest Anon party EVAR) I will tell you how to find her.

If you do it by this Thursday at 2pm, I will even tell you with what "Big Bang Theory" character she identifies, (Hint it's not "Penny" as I already claimed Penny).

What do you think HH, shall we do it?

Opps my mistake and now I cannot edit.

I mistook him with hellinahandbasket

Sorry

my bad
 

Gadfly

Crusader
Opps my mistake and now I cannot edit.

I mistook him with hellinahandbasket

Sorry

my bad

Well, the names do both begin with the letter "H", include the word "hell", and are fairly long names! :duh: :biggrin:

I had to do a reality readjustment when you said he was a "she". I never took HH to be a "she". :no:
 

PirateAndBum

Gold Meritorious Patron
Re: Tony Ortega reports on lawsuit by private detectives against Scientology

I've always wondered why the SO wasn't on the old "company script" payment system like the miners were before unions. I guess with the SO their script payments would only be redeemable at the canteen. I truly hope DM never reads about company store script because I have no doubt he would think it was a brilliant system and immediately implement it. It's a good thing DMs education is so limited, there are far too many cruel ideas in history for him to be inspired to use.

Heh, we are ALL being paid & using company script my dear. In the not too distant future we unfortunately will come to understand the value of paper...
 

BunnySkull

Silver Meritorious Patron
Company scrip folks, scrip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Paul
Grammar :nazi:

Yeah, my ipad didn't want to accept the use of scrip. I actually collect the stuff from mines in certain states. I am handicapped trying to post from an ipad, I have to finger type and I have accidentally hit the "post" or another hyperlink to take me off the page (usually after finger typing a huge chunk of text) too many times to count. I always pick it up in the evenings and swear I'm only going to read or browse, but I always find something I MUST post a reply too. It's a pretty big weakness.
 

John P.

Patron
Sorry to come a little late to the discussion, but I have been out of the loop for a couple weeks dealing with a (successfully resolved) family emergency.

Despite the rumored big war chest, I think they are hemorrhaging money.

I think they are playing a complicated shell game. They're keeping individual business units (orgs and others) at the edge of the enterprise starved to create a sense of urgency to get local constitutencies to up their donations to "save" the local org that they're familiar with. Thus, the unpaid property taxes on local orgs are quite intentional, as are the constant flirtation with having the power or phones cut off, or the elevator service contracts expire, etc.

However, I strongly suspect that the consolidated entity (i.e., all cult business units with financial statements combined into one composite set of books) is doing OK. Because of the low labor cost, cash purchases of buildings, etc., I would suspect that their profit margins approach 40% of "sales," even if the division-level books reflect a lot of divisions that are hemorrhaging cash. My back-of-the-envelope figuring suggests they'll pull in about $300 million in 2012, which is probably down $50 million from the last couple years given defections and given some of the large IAS donors being relatively tapped out due to the economy, etc. Global reserves will almost certainly be up again.

In the beginning of their grandiose Ideal Org planning and building acquisition phase, they contracted some big names that no doubt still want all the dough they were promised even if the donations are insufficient and projects are on hold.

They've hired two well-known global firms (Staubach for the real estate and Gensler for the renovations), each with master contracts to be the exclusive agents for their respective areas. While there may be some sort of monthly retainer for Staubach to cover costs of searching for properties, I don't think they have paid in advance for projects that they haven't actually committed to doing. It may be the case for buildings purchased but not yet renovated (Chicago, New Haven, the new Portland building), they have paid 20% down to Gensler. But even if you believe they're throwing 20% of a $5 to $10 million project cost at each of 20 future Idle Orgs, you're only talking about $20 to $40 million, which is but a fraction of the likely amount of overall reserves...

For those of you who haven't followed my work in other forums like Village Voice, I point out that I'm a Wall Street hedge fund stock picker and financial analyst. Building this scenarios is what I do for a living. While I won't bet my left nut on the accuracy of these numbers, I have a 20-year track record of being way better than average on my back-of-the-envelope figuring, like most of my colleagues.

They seemed to be spending money like they thought they had a never ending supply to burn. They made stupid mistakes, acted erratically and then moved too slowly, costing them more money.

Well said. This is exactly the problem. Miscavige moves slowly so that he can maximize the donation stream off every deal, getting lots of excess cash before he moves.

The biggest stupid mistake I've seen in the Idle Org scam was the Portland building -- they bought a building on the edge of downtown, with one foot in a crappy neighborhood, bought out the tenants, and only after they bought the damned thing did they realize that they didn't have room for the "chapel" that they wanted for the (fantasyland) 600 attendees they expect to host at one time. They put the building up for sale a year after they bought it for 20% less than they paid, and have gotten no takers. I am sure there are others, like the Chicago building that you are personally familiar with.

My observation, in my 25 years in the cult, is that it collectively does not manage money in a sophisticated manner.

My nominee for "understatement of the year."

If there are 2,000 SO members world wide (maybe there are more) feeding and clothing these people and paying for an occasional doctor or dental appointment adds up. $50 per week for 2000 people is $100,000 per week just in pay (not food, clothes, etc). ... That's 5.2 Million a year just for SO pay.

And assume that regular staff is about as much. But they probably have at least as much in incremental labor costs from living quarters, food, transportation (those buses every day from the luxurious Hacienda Gardens apartments in Clearwater to Flag, for instance) and all the rest (though, of course, no medical insurance). You're talking about 4,000 people on staff -- perhaps 1 in 6 or 1 in 8 of the active cult members worldwide, costing you about $25 million a year in maintenance.

That's actually less per person than what Hon Hai (Foxconn) pays their teeming thousands of Chinese slave laborers to build iPhones and other gadgets. Imagine how interesting it would be if Miscavige figures out that he has a slave labor force right here in the US of A which speaks English and can be rented out for all sorts of sleazy business operations for a dollar or two per person per hour. Cheaper than hiring homeless people.

Miscavige, et al are not versed in business dealings in the outside world. I can easily imagine that his distorted view of money and how it grows on trees (parishioners) would lead him into losing deals that he over-confidently believed he could reg his way out of with no consequence.

Exactly. Part of the problem is that the core IAS donor population is getting older, and many are trying to retire or are thinking of retirement. Some are undergoing major reversals -- what will Nancy Cartwright do when the Simpsons are over? Sure, she'll get residuals for years, but it won't be a fraction of what she's pulling in per new show. Craig Jensen's software company was largely made obsolete by huge changes in computer technology. Sky Dayton will never have another hit like Earthlink. And those hundreds or thousands of dentists and chiropractors aren't getting any younger, and their practices won't be worth much when sold -- so they are going to get more jealous of their retirement funding sources.

All that portends a big drop in IAS donations in the next 5 years if it hasn't already happened. And that will be the single biggest financial blow to the cult ever. They won't necessarily start operating in the red (on a consolidated basis) but they will definitely have to undergo a "severe reality adjustment" and they won't be able to hide from themselves the fact that the big money is gone forever.

From what I hear, they are absolutely swamped with refund requests.

That's nice to hear, but it probably won't make much difference to the organization, unless there's a class action suit to drive refunds. One of the key things that Miscavige doesn't understand is that the Internet makes it possible for the cult's opponents to scale up to immense size. That was first established in the Anonymous protests in 2008 -- they were able to turn out almost as many protesters as cult members simultaneously at dozens of cult facilities. Miscavige had to have shit in his pants when the reports started flooding into Int Base. And as the public base loses progressively more fear of the consequences of defying the organization, a class action suit is inevitable. And they won't be able to hide from that, particularly since any class action attorney will discover that prompt refunds are a proviso of the IRS agreement.

Time for serious popcorn when the first class action suit over refunds is filed!


I think the scam is at the end of the road. The Ponzi scheme is rolling up.

It's close. We won't be able to figure out exactly when the implosion will happen, but if we keep up the pressure, it will happen.
 
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